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Monday, July 16, 2012

The Stewarts And Douglas's In Lords Of Misrule

Some of the characters in Lords Of Misrule, The first volume of the House of Stewart trilogy, by Nigel Tranter, include Robert II, King of Scots; Robert Stewart; Lady Egidia Stewart; Jamie Douglas, illegitimate eldest son of Sir James, Lord of Dalkeith; Sir William Douglas of Nithsdale; and Alexander Stewart, Earl of Buchan, known as the Wolf of Badenoch.

The Battle of Otterburn* was the first important event in the Lords of Misrule. The battle made a hero of some, including Jamie Douglas, through whom the story is told, and the great warrior Douglas (James, 2nd Earl of Douglas) is murdered by one close to him during the battle and witnessed by Jamie. Was the murder a plot by the cold and calculating Robert Stewart? Many, including his sisters, think so.

A modern day flashback of the Battle of Otterburn?

*Bizarre Happenings - Several witnesses spoke of a phantom army which had been seen in November 1960 on a road near Otterburn, Northumberland, the site of a fourteenth-century battle. One of the witnesses, Mrs Dorothy Strong, was in a taxi. She said: 'Suddenly the engine died, the fare-meter went haywire and the taxi felt as if it was being forced against an invisible wall. The soldiers seemed to close in on us and then fade into thin air.' Several people said it had happened around that location before.

Recommendations for further reading from a Douglas message board: The Black Douglases: War and Lordship in Medieval Scotland, 1300-1455, by Michael Brown, and From the Bloody Heart: The Stewarts and the Douglases, by Oliver Thompson.